Public Indecency

(In honor of my graduatin’, I’m doing a retrospective of the most memorable things that happened to me in college.)

There are some days that you’ll remember for your whole life. Often these are great times that you want to crystallize in your mind forever and stand out as the best times of your whole existence. Others are days in which you manage to publicly humiliate yourself so many times that you look back and wonder how you survived the day without combusting into a pile of embarrassed ashes.

Guess which kind of day I’ll be talking about today.

So it was midway through my first semester sophomore year and I was taking 19 hours of pure engineering, math, and science, along with marching band and work. To say that I was stretched a little thin would be the greatest of understatements. Overall, it wasn’t horrible though, I was a wiz at time management back then.

The bad thing was, I had 3 midterms scheduled for the same day. Back to back to back. And the day before I had gone through a grueling band rehearsal followed by 5 hours that night at the law library. I was in no condition to study for anything, but I soldiered through anyway, staying up way too late, fueled by massive amounts of Dr Pepper.

Sadly the buzz did not carry through and I ended up oversleeping the next morning. I woke up 10 minutes before the first test and freaked out. I clothed myself as fast as humanly possible and ran from my basement room up the stairs. On the top of the stairs, I slipped a little and ran into the wall. Catching myself on the railing, I barely paused and kept running. This turned out not to be the best course of events.

Had I stopped to examine my situation, I would have noticed that I had caught the back pocket of my jeans on the metal that fastens the railing to the wall. Yeah, that didn’t happen, so instead, as I ran up and out of the stairwell, I hear this tremendous RIIII-IIIP.

I look down and realize that I have the back of my pants near my knees and the majority of my Snoopy-boxers-covered ass is exposed.

Simultaneous with this realization, comes the additional realization that my first exam has already started 4 minutes ago. Using the keen powers available to my caffeine-addled brain, I decide that there is no time to go back and change, I must get to this test. So off I run through campus, minus the back of my trousers, to take a test that I’m 10 minutes late for.

I get to the test, take it with only a few odd looks thrown my way, and speed off to the next. I get a lot more weird looks for this one, as I must traverse the whole of the engineering building. Engineers, by choice of profession, are not used to seeing someone bereft of the majority of their pants in their vicinity. But I have thick skin and ignore the laughs, I have a test to take.

Two down, one to go. The last one is in Dallas Hall, the main building on campus. This means I’ve got to pass through the main quad, by the fountain, and up the huge staircase of Dallas Hall in my current, publicly indecent state. By this point I’m pretty much at the end of my rope.

This is indeed confirmed by my miniature nervous breakdown that occurs a few minutes later during the calculus 3 test.

I look over the test, recognize absolutely nothing on the entire thing and come to the conclusion that I have more than likely just failed three tests consecutively, all while my ass is on display for all to see. I give a little yelp of hysterical laughter and try to finish as much of the test as I can.

Finally I am done and wander out of the hall. For better or worse, I tell myself, it is done. I feel a great weight is lifted, and do a little victory dance which entails a little jump in the air at the end. Sadly, the little jump occurs right at the top of the steps outside Dallas Hall. I trip, fall, roll, and otherwise just bite it all the way down the first half of the stairs, finally catching myself on the railing where the stairs even out. This is only a minor victory, because as I am pulling myself up, I slip again and roll down the rest of the steps. This is officially the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to me, and of course it happened whilst I was still missing the backside of my pants.

And thus ended the most painful and ridiculous day of my entire life to date. Because after that, I refused to leave my room for anything. I mean, seriously, after 4 hours like that, you don’t go outside again unless you’re looking for a bolt of lightning to take you away from it all. Which, looking back on it, might not have been a bad idea, on the whole.